Brrrr!

You know it's cold when...

• You wake up in the morning, see that the thermometer says 10 degrees outside and say, "Gee! That's not bad!" (because at least it's above zero, and it is above single digits.)
• Your nose hairs freeze together whenever you breathe through your nose.
• You actually stock up your house so you don't have to leave over the weekend to get groceries. Required supplies include brownie mix, chocolate chip cookie ingredients, chili and wild rice soup makings.
• It takes the dog all of 30 seconds to go outside and do his business, some of which sprays against the house because it is too cold to go all the way out to a snowbank.
• It's too cold to drink beer -- your drink of choice becomes Irish coffee.
• The radiators in the house run 24 hours a day to keep the house warm and become too hot to touch.

This isn't some list that gets passed around through the internet that I'm posting here, this is the honest to God truth of what we've been doing the past few days.

The kicker came last night when I was attempting to wash dishes. I ran out of hot water right away and couldn't figure out why because we have a water storage tank, not a hot water heater, which is connected to our boiler since our entire house is heated with hot water. I finally figured out that between trying to keep the house warm and Marissa just having bath water run, it was enough to drain that entire huge tank of hot water.

Brrrr!